View From The Blades Side

United boss Kevin Blackwell may point towards the sending off of Matthew Kilgallon as the turning point in Sunday's derby, but he was full of praise for his players' approach.

The Blades put in one of their worst derby day performances in recent history when they fell to a convincing 2-0 defeat at Hillsborough last season with Bryan Robson at the helm.

But despite a successive defeat at S6, Blackwell was proud of the effort and commitment of his 10-men as they pushed Wednesday for the full 90 minutes and showed a marked improvement from this time last season.

He told the official SUFC website: 'I am not going to criticise my players because I have no complaint about them at all. We had to change the system in a reshuffle and that is when we conceded.

'It was a pivotal decision but we showed great character after that to stay in the game right until the end when I thought Wednesday were just hanging on.

'After last season's game here there was criticism for our approach and this time we wanted to show some passion and commitment, which we did.'

And, despite stats proving otherwise, Blackwell was, shall we say, not best pleased with the performance of the referee and in particular the sending off of Kilgallon.

'I don't think we got any decision that mattered. I'm afraid if you talk about referees you get fined these days and I'm only a poor manager, so I can't talk about referees,' he told Sporting Life.

'Not just the sending off. There were other fouls that have gone on in the game that were blatant and he's missed them.

'If that's a sending off we might as well pack up and go home.

'There was no malicious intent there. If he's to take a booking, fair enough, but that was pathetic.'

Comments

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don't know what game you were watchin kev but i thought we outplayed you in every department, after the sending off and the goal we seemed to take our foot off the gas but never looked in any trouble other than set pieces, either we are a very good team or you are very bad, another 3 points off you and well deserved, thanks for turning up!!

I don't think we outplayed them. I think we were better than them but their most creative and dangerous player, Cotteril, was taken off in the wake of the sending off. This seriously took the edge off their attacking performance leaving them to hope for a shot of brilliance from Beatty, which nearly happened. When is Deon going to stop taking penalties? The game should have been dead and burried but instead we find ourselves hanging on and playing for time with 6 minutes to go! The free kick for timewasting was pathetic on our part, Grant (who was yet again a safe pair of hands) should know better and stop *****ing around. We should have won it at a canter but instead got lucky. JJ I presume was taken off in order to rest him for the fixture overload that is coming. Well that backfired. It's time to look past this fixture, the coming month will tell us if we are contenders or not. Derby fixtures will prove vital and a win at Barnsley will do alot of good but the real test will be on Saturday against Brum. Great to see Akpo and Jeffers back. The Blunts should hang their heads in shame for the crap that they shovelled at Kenny, the ones near me couldn't even give him the credit for the penalty save. 1-0 to Wednesday, now let's move on. It's a big season in front of us. C'mon Wednesday!

I thought they only had one good player on the pitch and that was Naughton. Thought he had a great game and looks a decent young player! Beattie was very very quiet. Thought our defence played very well adn Wood was superb!!

But did we win it easily? Should we have? That's my point. We made hard work of it and stupid mistakes could have cost us. WIEH I couldn't agree more, I've been critical of him in the past but Wood was superb.